Monday, August 13, 2012

The Windows Portable Apps Arsenal !

If you have been a Windows user as have been all these years, you surely must have realized the absence of power tools in Windows which are so freely accessible in a Linux BOX.

Although Windows 7 is a breath of fresh air, the power features still leave a lot to be desired.

Enter the excellent utilities like Sysinternals and Nirsoft.

The SYSINTERNALS Suite

The Sysinternals Suite is a collection of excellent tools (which are quite mature and well known in IT circles).

These were initially created in 1996 by Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell and contain a host of advanced system utilities. These guys even had a site dedicated to these tools and their usage, which now are a part of the Microsoft’s technical network.

The entire suite can be downloaded in full here as a zipped version, or you can refer to this catalogued index for searching what you want.

As an introduction to this suite, I am linking here to one of the most popular utilities of this suite, the Process Explorer.

The NIRSOFT Utilities

Coming to the Nirsoft arsenal, this site (http://www.nirsoft.net/) is dedicated to individual utilities for specific troubleshooting and feature handling for making day-today windows maintenance easier and transparent.

It is a single man operation run by Nir Sofer, and goes way back to 2001 when it was first conceived.

I can personally vouch for some of the utilities offered by this smart guy; they actually help in solving out small *pain in the ass* type issues, which plague generations of Windows box setups!

Now both these are OK to use occasionally for your own system housekeeping.

But what if you are the IT guy or one-stop-tech-help-guide for your circle of family and friends?

UTILITY LAUNCHER!

This would be a software-Swiss-knife combining the utilities of these two above packages in one convenient place of access!

WSCC is a free, portable program that allows you to install, update, execute and organize the utilities from various system utility suites. WSCC can install and update the supported utilities automatically. Alternatively, WSCC can use the http protocol to download and run the programs. WSCC is portable, installation is not required. Extract the content of the downloaded zip archive to any directory on your computer.\

Having used both, I can say that the although WSCC is better at getting updates and presents a cleaner, easy to navigate interface, NirLauncher is also a very interesting option, as you can couple up some other great utilities (like those offered by Piriform, creators of CCleaner).

Try these out, and maybe you can just convert that old 1 GB USB to the most weapon in your troubleshooting arsenal!

I have these on my pen-drive and regularly update them! These are an excellent add-on along with the USB bootable system repair ISO, which I would be covering later on in coming days.